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partners, the Indiegogo campaign, said
co-owner Gayle Shanks, “was designed...
to allow our customers to help us build
the store, which they truly wanted to do.
We have over 1,1000 people with a personal investment in our new space.” Plus
the store doesn’t have to pay back donors.

Crowdfunding campaigns can take
months to plan, and even so, Spellbound’s Hawkins said, she wished she
could have done a practice one first to
refine the perks. “It was so much work,”
added Changing Hands marketing director Brandon Stout. “Sometimes we asked
ourselves if we couldn’t have done a bake
sale.” In part, that was because the store
chose to go all in with fixed funding. If
it didn’t hit its goal, it wouldn’t receive
a cent. “Once you’ve launched, you’re
only just getting started,” added Stout,
who described keeping the campaign on
track as “a constant flog.” When it was
running behind about half way through,
he and other staffers sent out emails,
tweets, and even stuffed shopping bags
in the last two weeks to let people know
that the store needed their help.

Indiegogo vs. Kickstarter

Michelle Baron, owner of the 28-year-oldBook House in Maplewood, Mo., has hadplenty of practice. She ran two consecutiveIndiegogo campaigns followed by one onKickstarter after she lost the lease for herpre–Civil War location to a developer,who tore it down. A customer was behindthe store’s initial Indiegogo campaign tosave the building, which raised just over$5,650 towards a goal of $50,000. Baronmanaged to turn the idea around so thatcustomers understood that it wasn’t justthe building that was in trouble—so washer bookstore and her livelihood. The sec-ond Indiegogo campaign, which beganthree weeks after the first one, netted$2,530 towards a goal of $25,000.

For Baron there is no contest between
Indiegogo and Kickstarter. “We reached
a lot of new people with Kickstarter,” she
said. Athough some indie booksellers
object to Kickstarter because it uses Amazon for payments, Baron chose it over
Indiegogo because of Kickstarter’s much
bigger following. The campaign, which
ran from November 8 to December 8,
was picked up on Reddit and earned
more than Baron had from the two Indiegogo campaigns combined: $12,280.

Baron also tried to get more creative
with perks. One for $500, which enables
a person or group to sponsor a bookshelf,
has been so popular that she continued
selling it after the campaign ended. To
date, 10 people and groups have sponsored a shelf, including the St. Louis Romance Writer’s Group and local publisher Reedy Press. As with Indiegogo, Baron, said, “It’s not just about getting
money. You’re giving something back to
the community.” She’s already planning
another Kickstarter campaign for the fall.

Graphic designer Safwat Saleem, a
2013 TED Fellow who cowrote the video
for Changing Hands with his wife and
designed many of the perks, including
t-shirts and a calendar, prefers Kickstarter. “It’s not even close the amount of
people who see your project,” he said.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 24, 2014
gle pledge in its first two-and-a-half
weeks, can have value. If Victor Harris
doesn’t receive the money he needs to
open a bricks-and-mortar bookstore just
outside of Durham, N.C., he says that
he’ll push back his plans for a year or two.

In the meantime, he is continuing to operate the bookstore as an Amazon storefront.
“[Crowdfunding] is still a new phenomena. The rules are not set yet. For me,” said
Harris, “the worst case scenario is I get
more people to notice my campaign.”

Successful campaigns like one that
Changing Hands in Tempe, Ariz., ran
over the holidays to raise money for a second store in Phoenix to open in mid-May, are also about community. Its
tongue-in-cheek campaign, “Frank ‘N
Moby Build a Bookstore,” featuring two
literary characters not often conjoined
(Frankenstein and Moby-Dick), helped it
earn a whopping $91,000, more than
$10,000 over its stated goal. The money
won’t come close to covering the
$800,000 in initial costs, including
start-up capital, books, fixtures, and bar
equipment. While the bulk of the funding will come from loans, an investment
from the bookstore, and from the store’s
Part of Changing Hands’ successful campaign.

BloomsburyConsolidatesChildren’sImprints;

Easton LeavingBloomsbury isfolding its WalkerBooks for YoungReaders imprintinto the largerBloomsbury Chil-dren’s Books. As aresult ofthe con-solidation,WalkerpublisherEmily Easton will beleaving the com-pany. The decisionto fold Walker intoBloomsbury Chil-dren’s Bookscomes less than ayear after Blooms-bury refocusedWalker as a “bou-tique imprint” withmost of its list of18 books comingfrom Easton.

Hastings FindsMerger Partner

Hastings Enter-tainment hasagreed to mergewith one of its big-gest vendors andshareholders. Ac-cording to March